Every morning, Suresh Suwal finds his first customer of the day, Bhuwan Shrestha, waiting for him to roll up the shutters to his store. Shrestha, who is an ENT staff at Bir Hospital, has unfailingly arrived at Suresh’s Ranjana Soda Centre every day for the last twenty years. “The thing is, I come here to cure my hangover,” Shrestha says, without inhibition, “I drink in the evenings after work, and there is no better way to shrug off the sluggishness in the morning than a glass of this fresh soda.”

Continually in operation for the past 76 years, Ranjana Galli’s famous sodas have become a Kathmandu landmark in themselves. Shrestha is one of the nearly 1,200 customers that flock each day to this unassuming side street in the heart of Capital’s busy shopping district to swig down their favourite flavour of carbonated lemon soda. It is not without reason that a popular adage goes: “You can tell the age of a person in Kathmandu based on how much they paid for a Ranjana ko soda growing up.”

But for all its accrued fame, Kathmandu’s favourite summer drink began as an ambitious brainchild of a teenager. In 1936, Buddhiraj Suwal left his hometown in Sindhupalchowk, seeking greener pastures in the Valley, working as a domestic help for a government official in Chhauni as a scrawny 11-year-old. There, by happenstance, he found patronage with Pushkar Shumsher Rana, who would eventually gift him a machine that produced and bottled the carbonated soda. Rana, in turn, had received the machine as a gift from British officers in India, and had been mixing sodas with wine to create Spritzers for his family’s summer gatherings.       

A quick learner with a natural knack for business, Buddhiraj perfected the craft of bottling the sodas by the summer of 1942. Then when Nepal’s first movie theatre, Janasewa Cinema Hall, opened in New Road, the entrepreneur promptly opened up a small stall at the premises. Priced at a modest 2 paisa, the drink took off instantly and locals began to throng to New Road as much for the sodas, as for the Bollywood movies.

Buddhiraj’s soda remained a popular fixture at Janasewa until it was gutted by a fire in the early 60s. Temporarily out of business, Buddhiraj then began selling his drinks from a roadside stall in Bhugol Park for a while, before finally moving to a permanent location just outside the newly-launched Ranjana Cinema Hall—his store’s namesake. “It was a huge risk at the time. We rented out a building for Rs 600 a month, a fortune at the time and restarted from scratch,” says Suresh, “But at the back of my mind, we knew that we were sitting on a valuable product and the customers would eventually come.”

And come in droves they did. In the late 60s and 70s, when New Road morphed into the financial, cultural and culinary hub for Kathmandu, Ranjana’s sodas began drawing more than a 100 customers each day on average. By that time, Buddhiraj and his two sons, Suresh and Naresh, also began introducing different flavours to keep things interesting. 

“From early on, I was always keen on experimenting with flavours,” says Naresh, who operates the family’s storefront on Ranjana Street while Suresh bottles the sodas and runs the second store inside an offshoot chowk, “At first, we began experimenting with Cola and Orange flavours. But over the years, we have developed over 40 different varieties—from a clutch of fruity flavours to ones boasting cures to common ailments like acidity and headaches.”

To the question, what made their sodas such a favourite in Kathmandu, the brothers simply point to the antique soda machine handed down to their father by Pushkar Rana, which is now over a 100 years old. Manufactured by the long defunct Little & Co brand, the machine, according to Suresh, fuses water with Carbon dioxide before sealing the classic pop bottles with a marble. “It might sound complicated to the uninitiated but in truth it is quite simple,” says Suresh, “But the key technique lies in how you balance the water and the CO2—a trade secret we have perfected over time.”

Much has changed in the 76 years that the Suwals have served sodas to Kathmandu’s denizens. Their store has outlived the company that produced their soda machine and their bottles, the man who handed it down to them, the Janasewa Hall where they first struck gold and even the Ranjana Hall from where they derived their name. In that time, the only thing that has remained constant is the family’s dedication to their admittedly simple craft and their obeisance to a formula that works. And by the way Suresh’s son, Sumeru Suwal—the third generation in the business, continues to crank out different flavours of soda manually today, it will continue to remain the family mantra for decades to come.